Chapter 3
Sunday 1 October
The car park was empty, or almost empty, which was just how Kay liked them. The three solitary cars looked fetchingly forlorn amid the half acre of tarmac, like marooned boats on a becalmed grey sea. The white lines marking the parking bays gently converged towards the horizon like perspective lines in a “how to draw” book. The light was flat and even, thanks to the overcast sky. Everything looked just right as she squeezed off several shots on her Nikon digital SLR camera. Yet something in her was dissatisfied.
“What’s wrong?” asked Sondra, noticing Kay’s frown. Sondra was standing next to her, even though there was a reasonably clean bench she could have sat down on just a few feet away. Kay thought it might be a germ thing, but Sondra hardly ever sat down at the library either, and she had her antibacterial spray with her, so maybe it was just a sitting down thing.
Kay turned her mind to Sondra’s question. What was wrong? She pursed her lips and wrinkled her nose, trying to analyse why she was dissatisfied, before eventually deciding what it must be. “I think I’ve had it with empty car parks,” she announced. “I’ve done all I can with them. Artistically, I’ve taken the deserted car park photo about as far as I can. Anything more I do at this stage will be mere mimicry or pastiche. There may be, somewhere out there, a photographer with the vision to take the abandoned car park photograph to another level – another storey if you will – but I am not that person. Me and car parks – we’re done.”
“Well that’s a relief,” said Sondra.
Kay turned to her in surprise. “Why is that a relief?”
“Well I didn’t want to say anything before,” said Sondra, “but since you’ve said it yourself, I have to admit that I’ve never found car parks exactly… uh, appealing. I mean they’re hardly picturesque, are they? Not like other kinds of park, for example.”
“I’m not interested in photographing other kinds of park,” said Kay.
“Or cityscapes,” continued Sondra, “or people or meadows or flowers or–or horses.”
“None of those things interest me,” said Kay, disappointed in her friend. She really didn’t get her at all if she thought she’d be remotely interested in photographing horses.
“What does interest you then?” asked Sondra.
“Not sure,” said Kay, swivelling slowly on her heel to take in the surrounding scenery. She paused when her gaze fell on an arcade – if that was the right word for it. On the far side of a little access road stood an iron and glass structure covering a walkway leading to the big Asda. It was currently even emptier than the car park because the supermarket was closed, but she could imagine it teeming with customers busily moving their trolleys between their cars and the swishing glass doors of the supermarket. Several lines of trolleys stood chained to each other in bays at the far end of the arcade. Kay wasn’t particularly drawn to these, nor to the iron-and-glass superstructure. What interested her was the passage beneath it. She felt a stirring within her not dissimilar to the one she experienced when she first trained her camera lens on an empty car park.
Access ways.
“What?” said Sondra, and Kay realised she must have spoken these words aloud.
“I’m interested in access ways,” she said. “Places we have to go through to get somewhere else. Corridors, tunnels, aisles, passages, slipways, alleyways, even stairways. It’s a whole aspect of infrastructure we barely even consider, yet we use them all the time. They’re places of happenstance and adventure and serendipity. They’re human funnels where strangers rub up against each other.” She laughed. “They’re quite erotic in a way.”
Sondra shuddered. “Disgusting you mean.”
“That, too!” said Kay. “ And exciting and boring and everything in between. They are, in fact, the places in between.” She mentally added capitals to Places in Between , thinking it might make a good title for a new gallery on her Flickr account.
“Right,” said Sondra with a stoical nod. “So not flowers or meadows then.”
They made their way out of the car park and back onto the high street where they waited at the bus stop outside the Rose & Crown. Kay perched herself on the little bench while Sondra stood.
“Speaking of serendipity , how did things turn out with that boy on the app, the one you were having trouble with?” asked Sondra.
“Um, not too well in the end,” said Kay, fiddling with her camera strap as a ripple of guilt splashed at her ankles. “I liked him, I did, but I had to end it.”
“Oh, why?”
“He sent me a photo of himself.”
“Not attractive?”
“No, I mean he was fine. A bit boyish, but fine – nice looking.”
“Are you sure it was him?”
“Oh yes. He was so – he had absolutely no guile. None whatsoever. That was probably his nicest quality. Someone like Jeremy would never even think of sending a picture of anyone but himself.”
“And he was nice looking?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“So what was the problem?”
Their bus arrived and they got on. Kay found a seat and her friend took out a cloth and spray bottle from her bag and cleaned the one next to hers before lowering herself onto it. Kay checked out the aisle behind them and thought about lighting and camera angles.
“So what was the problem with Jeremy?” Sondra asked again.
“Oh, well there wasn’t one really. I mean he was fine, as I said. It was the picture he sent though.”
“What about it?”
“Well, there was someone else in it, someone standing next to him – his brother – and once I’d seen him…”
“You lost all interest in Jeremy?”
Kay nodded, ashamed. “It wasn’t just the picture – I’m not that shallow! He also told me about him, the brother. Or maybe I asked. Anyway, he looked and sounded dreamy. I decided I couldn’t let things escalate with Jeremy and end up lusting after his brother because that would just be awkward, especially as the brother is virtually married, so I had to drop him. I had no choice.”
“I hope you were nice about it,” said Sondra.
Again that ripple of guilt, reaching up to her knees this time.
“I wasn’t really. I just stopped replying to his messages.”
“You ghosted him?”
“Is that terrible of me?”
“Yes. Really terrible.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it or anything will you, Sondra.”
“How would you feel if someone did that to you?”
“Not very nice.”
“Exactly! You should write to him, tell him you’re sorry and end it formally. It’s only fair.”
“But I hate confrontations, you know I do. He’ll want to know why and it’ll become a whole thing. And I’ll end up feeling like crap. It’s much easier this way believe me.”
“Not for Jeremy it isn’t.”
Kay felt a flash of resentment towards her friend, who was always so serene in her moral certainties, like a duchess being carried along in her sedan while everyone else had to wade through the shit. Why didn’t she give the dating game a try for once and see how hard it was?
“So you think he’d prefer to hear the truth, do you?” Kay snapped. “ Sorry, Jeremy but I can’t go out with you because I fancy your brother. That would be kinder, would it?”
“No, of course not,” said Sondra. “But you could tell him a white lie. Something like, Dear Jeremy, I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you over the past few weeks, but I don’t feel ready for a serious relationship right now. Wishing you all the best for the future . At least that would put his mind at ease, because right now he might be worrying that he’d said something to upset you, or that you’d been murdered or something. If you send him a little message like that, it’ll allow him to move on with his life instead of being stuck in some horrid limbo. ”
Kay shuddered at the response such a message would elicit from Jeremy. Why the sudden change of heart Kay? I thought we really had something. Can’t you give us another chance?
He might even start quoting some of her earlier messages back at her. That was the trouble – and something she could never admit to Sondra – she’d let herself get much too carried away in their correspondence: I can tell you’re a man who knows how to handle a club … you know I dreamed about you last night … hey isn’t the word ‘flesh’ sexy?? After that kind of talk, Sondra’s prim little message could never cut the mustard. He’d know instantly it hadn’t come from her.
But there was something else Sondra had said just now that had caught her attention. Something about being murdered. What if her Serendipity self somehow got herself killed? Now that was a much more appealing thought!
*
With his scarred cheek and broken nose, the man looked like he’d been tripped up and headbutted a few times by life, yet his steady, watchful grey eyes were not those of a victim, but an opportunistic predator. He’d been standing in front of Kay and Sondra at the bus-stop and had taken his seat on the bus before they found theirs just behind him, so he’d overheard most of what they’d said without intending to. A ghoster, he thought to himself, or half-thought, his mind mostly being on other things, like the smoked haddock fish pie he was going to cook himself tonight. A ghoster who seeks to avoid confrontations with the truth. Interesting! I wonder how far she’d be prepared to go. Probably not that far. Most people only like to bathe in the shallows when it comes to lying. Fish pie and a nice glass of Sauvignon Blanc. And after dinner, what then? Curl up with a book? So many paddlers out there, so few real swimmers, sadly. He had a hankering for some Patricia Highsmith tonight. Maybe he’d reread The Talented Mr Ripley . Or should he fire up the old computer and check out serendipity.com?